PC Gaming Hardware Shipments Twice That of Consoles

There's a group called the PC Gaming Alliance that concerns itself with the growth of, oddly enough, PC gaming. It recently released the results of its Horizons Hardware research report which found that the annual PC gaming hardware shipments in 2009 were over two times that of the three major gaming consoles combined. They also measured the sales of consumer PCs equipped with discrete GPUs (no netbooks and PCs with integrated graphics) capable of gaming and found the sales totaled $54.6 billion in 2009 with sales expected to continue to climb to $61.3 billion over the next five years.

Lest you simply dismiss this as a function of PCs costing more than consoles, the report goes on to say that the number of consumers gaming on these discrete graphics equipped systems will grow from 212.6 million in 2009 to about 322 million by 2014.

Interestingly enough, the U.S. is not the largest market for PC gaming hardware, accounting for only about 22% of the total market. The Asia Pacific region claims the crown with 33% with Western Europe coming in at 24%.